


Gonna Stop Bleeding Alone

by winter_rogue



Category: Inception (2010), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Inception, Canadian Shack, Dreaming, Forging, M/M, pasiv
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 18:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1276426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_rogue/pseuds/winter_rogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the record, he had not planned to spend Christmas Eve this year tied to a chair somewhere in central Moldova and bleeding from a split lip and what he hoped, desperately, futilely, wasn’t a broken nose.</p><p>Stiles Stilinski's life goes from out of the frying pan into the frozen north.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a thing that's been living on my hard drive for about a year and it's not done but every once in awhile I open it and pick at it. Because the truth is I sort of love this story. I love Inception. It was the first fandom I really wrote anything in and I have a huge, gross soft spot for it and this idea just rattles around in the back of my head concerning Derek Hale and dreamsharing. 
> 
> Does this float anyone else's boat?
> 
> Disclaimer: I haven't watched s3 at all and I probably won't but this is a fusion/alternate reality so there shouldn't be any huge problems.

For the record, he had not planned to spend Christmas Eve this year tied to a chair somewhere in central Moldova and bleeding from a split lip and what he hoped, desperately, futilely, wasn’t a broken nose. Whittemore would say it improved his face—upgrading it from fuck ugly to just unbearable—but Jackson Whittemore was an idiot and a third rate architectural hack—hence his current predicament…probably…maybe—and could go straight to hell for all Stiles cared at the moment. Fuck, this was the last time he did a stupid favor for Scott. No really, the _last_.

 

This is Stiles Stilinski; to say he’s having a bad day might be putting things a bit mildly.

 

“Tell me Gnegon, where can I find your employer, Christopher Argent?”

 

Stiles dribbled blood and spit. He was having a bit of difficulty focusing on the guy talking to him, the one asking the questions and overseeing all of this like it was a Sunday brunch over beens and toast, like watching his _associate_ —sarcasm most definitely included—rearrange Stiles’ face was boring. It had been a day, not quite two if his sense of time wasn’t completely fucked up, since they’d grabbed him and he was tired and thirsty and now, more than a little confused.

 

“What?” he managed, squinting up through the blood and the sweat. His whole face hurt, concentrated around where the big guy’s knuckles met the cartilage in his nose, but radiated out to his cheek, the whole zygomatic bone really, up around the supraorbital foramen to the process until his whole head felt like it was caught in a vise of pressure and pain. Involuntary snot and tears, a biological reflex.

 

It wasn’t surprise at the use of his name, his _real_ name not the one he’d been using in the extraction world for the last five years—though that was strange enough on its own. Rather—

 

“I don’t work for—who the hell is Christopher Argent?” A lie, of course he knew who Christopher Argent was, who hadn’t heard of the Argent family? But Stiles liked to think he had slightly higher standards than to get mixed up with that particular flavor of crazy. 

 

He watched his interrogator's face darken, the way the hired muscle’s hands flexed, knuckles rough and bloody, and tried to swallow the sudden lump in his parched throat. If you were to weigh the perilous nature of his current situation, the Argents actually started to look pretty good.

 

“I think you are lying to me Gnegon. I do not appreciate it when people _lie_ to me.”

 

This had to be the most cliche thing that had ever happened to him. No, really. Stiles may have been a career criminal but he’d always preferred to keep the guns and fist fights and—

 

Enforcer Number One, let’s call him Knuckles for the sake of clarity, swung and planted his fist in Stiles’ gut. And the worst part, the absolute worst as he had learned, wasn’t the pain. At least it wasn’t the pain in the last moment, because there would be pain but it came a second later. No, the absolute worst was the way the blow knocked all the air out of his lungs. Like the time in first grade when he’d slipped on the playground and caught his ribs against the hard metal railing.

 

His body tried to curl up against the pain, straining at the course ropes binding him to a chair. Because somehow it was his life that, not only had the job gone sour, but he’d been nabbed by some Ukrainian mob boss on his way through customs with a beef to pick with Stiles’ supposed employer.

 

Stiles maintains, however, he does not work for an Argent. Or he would, if he had any air left to do the…maintaining…with.

 

“Oh god,” he wheezed and tried not to watch his life flash before his eyes.

 

“Come now, Mr. Stilinski, do not make me ask you again.”

 

Now this was just becoming insulting.

 

“Do you have to go to a special school to learn how to talk like that?” he shot back. Well, he tried to at least, it mostly came out as a pained wheeze but from the sour smile on the other man’s face, the message seemed to have gotten through, to one degree or another.

 

The man sighed, like Stiles was purposefully causing him a great deal of stress, like it was Stiles’ fault he was clearly developing a migraine. 

 

“Very well, if you’re sure you are not willing to cooperate—” the low, distinct buzz of a phone vibrating cut him off. Stiles listened to a mostly incomprehensible greeting, the irritable back and forth of a voice in the room arguing with the voice on the other end of the connection. He let his head hang there, losing himself in the hot, angry throb of blood in his face, and the swelling.

 

Three days ago, Stiles had woken up in the cramped hotel suit he’d been sharing with Scott, packed up the PASIV device and gone to work. Less than twelve hours later, extraction complete, wire transfers confirmed, he’d been on his way out of the country. They were cutting it close on this job but Scott had promised him the holidays off and Stiles was determined to get back home in time for Christmas. Less than forty-eight hours later, he was trying not to—

 

Well, he was uncomfortably aware that he might never see anything other than the dingy walls of this warehouse ever again. God, listen to him, maudlin much? The head guy, the one asking all of the questions, ended his phone call and stared at Stiles coldly for a long, horrible minute. A snap of his fingers and a loaded exchange of glances, Knuckles backed off until there was a buffer of space between them and Stiles, still strapped to his chair and bleeding.

 

“My apologies, Mr. Stilinski, it appears there has been a mix-up. Do have a nice day.”

 

Stiles watched them pack up into the shiny black SUVs, half disbelieving and half collapsed in stunned relief as they drove off. He shivered and started pulling at his bonds, testing their give since it appeared he’d been left to get himself out of them.

 

Right about the time he was trying to figure out the best way to dislocate one of his thumbs so he could get his hands free, he heard the distinct sound of an engine cut off and a woman materialized from the shadows a minute later. 

 

She was average height, average build, long dark brown hair pulled back in a sleek, utilitarian ponytail, and sharp features, darkly shadowed in the fading daylight. She was dressed sensibly in dark jeans and a wool peacoat. Beautiful in a way that wasn’t trying hard to be noticed. He felt, inexplicably, almost more terrified than he had been ten minutes ago when Knuckles was trying to rearrange his face and he couldn’t have told you why.

 

The woman walked right up to him, pulled a knife out of her pocket and neatly sliced through the ropes holding him up.

 

“Not the most auspicious of introductions, I’m sorry about that.” Her voice was mild and bland. American, accent-less and kind of droll, if someone asked him to describe it.

 

Stiles weighed the pros and cons of running away as fast as he could—probably not very fast, let’s be honest—or staying here, slumped and trying not to wheeze through his mouth, for the foreseeable future. The woman took the decision out of his hands when she grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. She slung one of his arms over her shoulder and hauled his wobbly kneed ass outside and into the Land Rover parked there.

 

“I’m sorry, but what the hell is going on? Who _are_ you? Who were _they_?” Stiles demanded. He blinked stupidly while she _strapped him into his seatbelt_.

 

“I’m Laura. Laura Hale. And I want to hire you.” She handed him a closed bottle of water by way of shoving it in his face as she pulled them away from the scene of the crime.

###

It can be a bit hazy for him, sometimes, trying to recall how this became his life. He took a class from Professor Miles, who introduced him to Deaton, who said he thought Stiles was the most promising young man to come across his path since Arthur. Stiles didn’t know who the hell _Arthur_ was, or at least, he hadn’t at the time. Maybe if he had, he would have done the smart thing and gone screaming in the other direction.

 

The smart thing, because he’s only met Arthur once, but the guy was the most unassuming scary motherfucker Stiles has ever had the misfortune of accidentally pointing a gun at. The once. Just the once. With a little time and distance, he’s mostly just grateful he made it out of that one with all of his parts still attached.

 

That’s the sort of business this is. Where you don’t know your co-workers’ real names, you steal people’s secrets from their dreams, and just about everyone is wound up so tight all it would take is a sneeze to push them over the edge from charmingly eccentric to straight up limbo-looney toons.

 

Stiles is a dream thief, did he forget to mention that?

 

So most of the time it went like this: Stiles screened the potential jobs and the clients, he maintained their carefully cultivated contact list of People Not Totally Batshit (Also Competent), he hired the architect and the forger if one was required, arranged for the chemicals; he did the bulk of the research and developed the extraction plan with Scott. But down in the dreams, the show was all Scott’s. Scott had always been good at making people trust him, getting them to like him, getting them to underestimate him with just a disarming, puppyish smile. By contrast, Stiles tended to annoy people until he got whatever it was that he wanted.

 

They worked well together. They made ridiculous amounts of money. And the other half of Stiles’ job often included shoot-outs and knife fights with angry projections, but you know, he could deal with that. The blood all disappeared the second he woke up.

 

Stiles had always worked hard to keep their lives as clean as possible. Except for the white collar corporate espionage. Still, he preferred to leave the guns and the bullets down in the dream.

 

This wasn’t the first time he’d been jumped on the way out of dodge, but sitting in the car next to a silent Laura Hale— _the_ Laura Hale….maybe…probably—while they sped through a grey, central European warehouse district on Christmas Eve, Stiles was feeling strangely relieved it wouldn’t be the last. Yes, he was actually feeling grateful that he’d have people trying to beat him up in the future. Because it looked like he was going to live long enough to _see_ that future, thank you very much.

 

Laura didn’t say anything until she’d all but carried him into a cold, furnished townhouse in downtown Chişinău. At least Stiles thought it looked like the capital. She came back to the kitchen with a hefty looking first aid kid, a fluffy white towel and a bowl. 

 

“Um, ow!” It wasn’t a shriek, it was a manly protest of pain. 

 

“I don’t think it’s broken, but you might want to get it checked out by a real doctor when you get back stateside.”

 

“Thanks?” Stiles was trying to keep track of his rapid change in fortune. He stared, licking blood off his lips and grimaced while Laura— _Laura Hale_ —ran warm water into the bowl, dipped the towel in it and offered it to him. He took it numbly and kind of poked at his face absently until it erupted in a fiery, painful reminder of his new, extensive collection of colorful bruises.

 

She was laughing at him now, that’s lovely.

 

“You said something about hiring me?” he asked, feeling pretty damn grouchy and less grateful for the save if she was just going to stand there and laugh at his pain.

 

Laura pulled up a second kitchen stool and climbed up onto it. She watched him clean his face with a curious tilt to her head.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Did you hire the guys who did this, too?” he gestured at his face.

 

“No. They got to you first, actually. You should be more careful who you work for.” He could hear the judgement underlying her words quite clearly.

 

“I’m not a child, thanks,” he snapped, sloshing water. “And I don’t know where they were getting their information but I _don’t_ work for Chris Argent.” He looked up and watched a quick, complex play of emotions pass across Laura’s face before her expression smoothed out.

 

“Maybe not intentionally. I’m not here about that though. You’re a point man, but I hear you worked as a research analyst right out of high school. The grapevine says you’re one of the best ferrets in the business.”

 

The implied praise made a tiny kernel of warmth glow bright in the middle of his chest. Stiles stamped it down as hard as he could and went back to cleaning up all of his _own blood_.

 

“I don’t know if I’d call myself the _best_.”

 

Laura snickered softly. “Good, because that’s not what I said. I said _one_ of the best. Semantics.” Then she winked at him.

 

Stiles huffed. “Yes, okay, research, it’s what I do and yes, I’m good at it. Are you looking to hire a point man? Because I have to tell you, I work exclusively with McCall so—”

 

“No, not as a point man. But I do need you to find someone for me. Think you might be interested?”

 

Stiles considered the bland white formica countertop between them. “Do I really have a  choice?”


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

New York City had seemed like the place to be. Stiles’ French was absolute shit, even after the twelve month fellowship he’d spent in Paris. Scott had been in New York then, living off his bio dad’s guilt and squeaking by at school, so he’d moved out there too. The first couple jobs he had pulled for Deaton net him a cool six figures, it had been enough for a down payment on a loft in Williamsburg. Yeah, it was grossly hipster of him but Stiles liked to think of himself as the new generation of criminal, the hip generation. 

 

So sue him.

 

It meant he was surrounded by an ever evolving crowd of rich and poor wannabe artists, writers and musicians. They didn’t ask a lot of questions other than what he’d thought of so-and-so’s latest book or if he’d seen [ fill in the blank ] at McCoy’s Art House last week. 

 

And if he appeared and disappeared at random and avoided giving away any personal information, that just made him alluringly eclectic in the right circles. When push came to shove he could waste an empty hour talking about drinking espresso in Paris in the rain—which was the only way to see Paris that year, in the rain—and he could argue that you hadn’t really experienced maté until you’d had it in Peru or Buenos Aires, and the best tattoo artists had all moved to Barcelona anyways.

 

It turned out to be, if the not the perfect place, then as good as any other place, to set up his safe house. Kept his business as much out of California and away from his dad as was reasonably possible and that’s the way Stiles liked it.

 

He liked hiding in plain sight, fading into the ironic pretension. Giving just enough and letting other people draw their own conclusions about the rest.

 

He flew into JFK airport the morning of December 26th with two black eyes and a sore face but, thankfully, an unbroken nose. When he turned on his personal cell, he felt marginally relieved to see two dozen missed calls from Scott and his dad. He called the latter first, murmuring apologetically and making up a lie about work to apologize for missing fucking _Christmas again, Stiles_. Yeah, he was going to end up paying for that one.

 

Then he sent Scott a carefully worded text to let him know he was out of the red. Laura hadn't said anything, and the brief bit of recon he’d done before boarding the plane back to the States seemed to indicate that the rest of his team had gotten out of the country without a problem after the job. But it wouldn't do to go blowing his location to another Eastern European gang member in the event that Scott had been compromised too.

 

He breathed an internal sigh of relief when his best friend responded a couple minutes later, relaying their private all clear code and what sounded like a blissfully ignorant comment regarding Stiles’ ability to schedule flights accurately.

 

Nice to know Scott had his back. Queue eye roll. 

 

Don’t get him wrong, Stiles loved the guy like a brother and he even loved working with him—most of the time—but ever since Scott had met Allison No-Last-Name, he’d been pretty absent minded. Who could blame him though when he had Allison No-Last-Name the hot, up-and-coming architect, interested in having regular sex with him.

 

Stiles wasn’t going to judge. He was going to be happy for his best friend. No really, he was.

 

Right after his faced finished healing. Yup.

 

It’s a relief when the taxi pulls up outside his building on Broadway, and Stiles hauls himself, his PASIV disguised as a briefcase, a hanging bag full of work clothes in less than pristine condition and his carry-on up to his sixth floor condo. He doesn’t really breathe his first sigh of relief until he’s dumped everything inside and bolted the door behind him.

 

“Jesus fuck,” he mutters to the empty, stale air, and goes to pour himself a drink.

###

This is the situation Stiles finds himself in: Laura Hale— _the_ Laura Hale—wants him to track down her little brother who has somehow managed to fall completely off her radar.

 

To put that into context, it’s like—well, it really isn’t like anything. 

 

Here’s the thing, in his business, the Hales are the Rockefellers. They’ve been around forever and they do everything; they’ve got fingers in pretty much everyone’s pies. And they get away with it because they have always been disgustingly efficient and competent. They are the counter to the Argent family in just about every respect.

 

They’re also one huge motherfucking cautionary tale, and it pays to remember that.

 

Laura may be the head of the household these days, but everyone know she ascended to that lofty position in the wake of her entire extended family’s suspicious deaths. 

 

A lot of people liked to talk shit that Laura and her brother—the enigmatic family forger—had plotted the clan’s downfall for their own gain. Riding the coattails of the industry’s first successful inception, the timing had been suspect. But Stiles had a hard time believing anyone in a family that close could throw each other over in cold blood, even for cash.

 

The facts are pretty sketchy. Laura and Derek Hale had led an inception team a little over two years ago into the mind of a brilliant energy mogul and, within a month, everyone else in their family was dead. Poisoned, or knifed, or gunned down in their homes, their safe houses, their places of business. Maybe it was an inside job, maybe it was the inevitable conclusion of some petty industry rivalry—let’s not be naive, the Hales may have been on the relative up and up, but they still had enemies. 

 

Stiles had never felt the need to go digging where his nose most definitely would not have been welcomed.

 

That’s a lie, he _totally_ felt the need to poke his nose in where it was likely to be less than appreciated. But for all his supposed genius with a wi-fi connection and google, he hadn’t turned up anything interesting or concrete. Now, he had carte blanche from the head honcho herself to go digging. Okay, not into the fire itself but close enough.

 

According to Laura, her brother had disappeared a little over a year ago. She hadn’t thought anything of it at first. She didn’t say it, but Stiles had come away with the impression that this wasn’t the first time Derek had pulled a vanishing act. But when she’d gone looking for him a couple months later for a job he was no where to be found. 

 

Laura wasn’t a point man, she didn’t have the same carefully cultivated skill set as Stiles, but she did have connections and she knew Derek better than anyone. Not that that was hard; you could throw an awful lot of stones before you managed to hit someone who had even _met_ Derek Hale, let alone knew anything real about the guy.

 

The fridge was mostly empty, a necessary hazard when the work took him out of town for weeks or months at a time. Stiles pulled out a bottle of lemon juice and poured it in a glass along with a spoonful of sugar when it passed the sniff test. He splashed whiskey on top of that, stirred, desultory and dug a couple of ice cubes out of the bottom of the freezer that didn’t look too cloudy. 

 

He went around the flat, flipping on switches to make sure everything still worked, running the water in the kitchen and the bathroom until it was clear and warm. He rebooted the wireless and woke up his personal server, so that the 700sqft he called home hummed quietly around him. A cheesy string of white fairy lights strung across three oversized windows illuminated the space as the sun sank over the Williamsburg skyline.

 

He’d stock up on groceries later. Now, Stiles put in an order for dumplings and hot and sour soup from the Chinese place around the corner and booted up his laptop.

 

Laura had left him in possession of a file containing a current—current being a relative term in this case, he supposed—physical description, a mostly up to date photo, a list of places she’d already had checked, a list of known associates—not friends, she hadn’t used the word “friend” mind you—the address to Derek’s personal residence (abandoned), likes, dislikes, and a map of the national parks in Upstate New York. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was supposed to do with that last bit.

 

Google was always a good place to start, even when it came to the people in extraction. He’d have the wayward brother’s location locked down by the end of the week and with it, release any lingering obligation he had to Laura Hale for calling off the guys back in Moldova.

 

“Alright, Derek Hale, come out come out, wherever you are.”

###

Six hours later, Stiles was beginning to wonder if Derek Hale had ever even breathed on a computer before in his life.

###

“Hey dude, do you want me to grab you a—oh, never mind. Hey, Stiles, you know your fridge is empty right?”

 

“Yes, Scott,” Stiles said, distracted and pissy “Hence the take away. If you wanted a beer maybe you should have thought to bring some over yourself.”

 

Scott was looking at him with the puppy eyes, Stiles could feel them burning into the side of his head, all sad and forlorn and big, even if he couldn’t be bothered to turn and _look_ at them. He kept typing. He wasn’t going to look. Nope.

 

“Stiles,” Scott whined, closing the refrigerator door. 

 

“I’m serious.”

 

Almost forty-eight hours since he had started his search and Stiles was starting to think he actually knew less about Derek Hale now, then he had when he started.

 

“ _Stiles.”_

 

He had a system to how he tackled research. It was a good system, trusty, effective. Stiles wasn’t a world class hacker or anything, he contracted the trickier projects to a college buddy at CalTech, but he knew his way around the internet and he cultivated backdoors wherever he went. So he started with the FBI, using a cloned login from his dad’s credentials. And when that turned up no hits he expanded his search, snooping around the CIA databases and then Interpol’s.

 

Derek Hale might as well be an electronic ghost. It wasn’t that there was information out there and it was hidden or deleted, it just wasn’t _there_. In general, he didn’t believe in an absence of data; data was his job, his baby, he always got the details.

 

“What are you doing, anyways? I didn’t know we had a new job.”

 

So far, Scott hadn’t mentioned Stiles’ little layover in Moldova. He was trying not to be too resentful about it.

 

“We don’t.”

 

“So, what—”

 

“It’s a private job, Scott,” Stiles couldn’t help the hint of a snarl in his voice. Truthfully, he resented the hell out of the fact that his Best Friend in the World—capitals most definitely necessary—not only didn’t notice how he’d spent almost three days at the mercy of some gangsters, being used as a punching bag, but hadn’t even thought to ask about it. I mean, was it too hard for Scott to ask him how he was doing? Why his face looked like it had been run into the side of a building multiple times? Instead of just barging into his home and going for the nonexistent beer like a hops seeking missile? 

 

He can see Scott frown out of the corner of his eye.

 

Laura had given him the names of Derek’s preferred aliases, including one she said she wasn’t supposed to know about. The only activity he could find on them was all over a year old. A train ticket purchase fourteen months ago in Zurich. Clothes eleven months ago in Stockholm. By all appearances he’d been kicking around Western Europe for a little while but then—nothing. No hits to tell where he’d gone after that.

 

Now he was in the process of pulling up utility information for the Hale safe house locations to try and see if he could ferret out Derek’s location that way. He wasn’t going to hold his breath about it though.

 

He had to look up when Scott very cautiously sat down across from his at the kitchen table and started fidgeting. Stiles tried to school his face into something neutral, above it all, all the irritation, betrayal, hurt and frustration. Scott still winced, wrung his hands and looked back at him pleadingly.

 

“Where’s Allison?” Stiles deflected, instead.

 

Scott slumped. Allison No-Last-Name had inspired the sort of instant devotion Stiles could remember well from the first time he met Lydia-Yes I Was Shortlisted for a Noble Prize _and_ a Fields Medal Last Year-Martin. Stiles was still unsure how Scott had met the scarily competent Allison, through a friend of a friend and a rumor. But her dream architecture had been dizzying, beautiful, elegant, and as deadly as she was with a bow down in the dream.

 

“She, uh.” He scrubbed a hand back through his hair. It was getting long again and curling along the nape of his neck. “She sort of took off. Said she had some family stuff to deal with.” He looked pretty dejected, but it explained why he’d spent the last two hours bumming around Stiles’ apartment, whining fitfully and generally making a nuisance of himself.

 

Stiles dredged up a weak smile and clapped Scott once on the shoulder, hard and companionable. 

 

“She’ll be back, bro. Don’t you worry.” 

 

Something pinged on his laptop and Stiles refocused his attention on the search string. He let out a small, involuntary whoop as he scrolled through the results.

 

“What?”

 

“The first good news I’ve dug up all day. Can’t hide from the utility company, Mr. Hale.” 

 

It was buried, if you could really call it “burying,” under an alias Laura had not been able to supply, but one Stiles had stumbled across while he was googling the ones she did know about: a fake ID bearing the name James Daniel (heh) and two properties maintained by Mr. Daniel over the last three years. The details suggested to Stiles’ critical eye to be the work of Mr. E— good work, reliable and almost totally off the digital radar, it was kind of extremely good luck on his part that he’d found them at all.

 

The first location was an apartment in Switzerland that showed no mentionable activity in the past eighteen months, since, presumably Derek had only passed through on his way further afield. The second, a house in Auckland, coughed up regular electricity bills for the last year, double what they had been in the preceding six months. That wasn’t to say they were off the roof but it definitely suggested regular activity, someone turning on the lights and running a computer.

 

“Gotcha,” Stiles crowed to himself, feeling uniquely satisfied. There was very little like the thrill of discovery, of ferreting out a person’s secrets. He shot off an email to Laura with the name of the alias and the GPS location for the house and a tongue-in-cheek note that said he hoped this would see the way to clear any debts between them.

 

Scott was watching him when he closed up his laptop with a triumphant little hum. Feeling suddenly magnanimous Stiles got to his feet and clapped Scott on one shoulder.

 

“Come on, you can buy me dinner.”

 

Scott sputtered but followed him out the door.

 

“My genius must be fed!”

 

“Your ego, maybe,” his friend muttered, but good-naturedly and they tussled into the cool evening.

###

Less than thirty-six hours later, he had a reply in his inbox.

 

_House was empty with the heat on. Try again. ~L_

###

He wasn’t happy to admit things continued in a similar vein the rest of the week. After that first lead, others started popping up on his search grid. Another small property owned by Mr. Daniel, a third ID buried under a well-erased paper trail and another passport\, a prepaid credit card, bills paid on three continents. All of it a meticulously crafted web of red herrings. And Stiles knew after the fourth false lead, Laura was starting to grow impatient if her progressively clipped voicemails were anything to go by.

 

Stiles was trying not to feel a) desperate and b) impressed. It had been awhile since anyone proved difficult for him to find. As much as he was impatient to discharge his personal debt to Laura and finish the job, another part of him was having a bit of fun playing a game of cat and mouse with Mr. Hale’s digital ghost. 

 

Three weeks into his hunt, the data trail winnowed down to a trickle. Stiles had a feeling he was about to run out of leads and he wasn’t feeling particularly certain that Derek would be standing there for the great reveal.

 

Stiles had followed an extremely sketchy money trail into Canada and records of phone calls out of Whitehorse that may or may not have been placed from a burner associated with one of the aliases he’d linked to Hale. It wasn’t a good lead; hell, it practically wasn’t a lead at all. But the last call was from four months ago and consequently the most recent piece of data he’d uncovered.

 

Scott was camped out on his couch still, eating him out of take away and watching Hallmark Movie Channel marathon after Lifetime Movie Channel marathon. It was starting to drive Stiles round the bend.

 

“How angry do you think Laura would be if I accidentally send her on another wild goose chase into the wild reaches of Canada?” he asked the world at large.

 

“Wait.” Scott blinked at him lethargically, crunching on stale Christmas tin popcorn. “All this…you’ve been working for Laura _Hale_?”

 

“Yeah.” He shrugged when Scott just gaped at him. Then his best friend narrowed his eyes, sitting up on his knees so he could stare over the back of the sofa.

 

“Is that safe?” 

 

And, he had to love Scott, because as wrapped up in his own misery as he was that he _still_ hadn’t bothered to ask Stiles about what happened in Moldova, the guy looked genuinely concerned right now.

 

He waved off Scott’s tone, “Yeah. She, uh, sort of saved my ass awhile back and—I don’t think she killed her family. The evidence just doesn’t match up, no matter what people say.”

 

“Oh.” 

 

Stiles watched Scott try to absorb that, make it fit in his head. He could practically hear the second a flashing _Hold on!_ sign derailed his friend. 

 

“Wait, what do you mean she saved you? When?” 

 

Now Scott just looked upset and _really_ confused, setting aside the popcorn and coming over to sit with Stiles at the kitchen island where he had his computers set up. 

 

“Stiles?”

 

He sighed and sat back, meeting Scott’s wide, brown eyes. 

 

“I got grabbed after our last job. Spent—” he swallowed the truth with hardly a blip of his heart, the trick was all in the breathing, “a couple hours with a rather unpleasant fellow who wanted to know about Chris Argent. They thought I was working for him or something. Laura swooped in like—”

 

“Catwoman?” Scott interrupted excitedly.

 

Stiles scoffed. “More like Pepper Potts, ultra efficient and terrifying. So yeah, I’m working for her. Kind of quid pro quo at this point, which I would feel a lot better about if I could actually find anything useful.”

 

Scott’s face crumpled sympathetically. “I thought you did find something like weeks ago.”

 

Stiles grimaced. “False leads. A lot of very false leads. _Clever_ ones, but, yeah.”

 

“Oh.” Scott considered this. “Well, I guess you could always go check it out yourself before you say anything to, uh, to Laura. If you’re worried about another fake-out.”

 

Stiles felt a slow grin spread across his face. “That’s not a terrible idea. I go snoop around, get some proof that I’ve found him, and then pass it on. And if I’m wrong, again, no one ever has to know.” He leapt up, hands already in motion unplugging equipment and making a mental list of things he’d need to arrange. He slid open a false panel under the kitchen countertop and started sorting through passports.

 

Scott looked pleased to have provided a useful solution as he sat watching. “Where do you have to go anyways?”

 

“Whitehorse. Well, about twenty miles north, but I think that’s the closest I can fly in.”

 

“Where’s that?”

 

“The Yukon,” Stiles replied absently. He wasn’t looking to see Scott’s eyes widen, his mouth falling open in surprised disbelief.

 

“Wait, what do you mean, the _Yukon_?”

**Author's Note:**

> hang out with me over at [tumblr ](http://winterrogue.tumblr.com)\- ngl, there's a lot of hockey there these days.
> 
> you can also follow my author twitter @liacooperwrites or [blog](http://liacooperwrites.wordpress.com) if you're curious about any of my original fiction (it too has werewolves and sex ;))))


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